Book 14 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year!

Hard-boiled detective stories often start in a similar manner: a gritty private investigator has a gorgeous dame walk through his office door with a case — but that woman is a femme fatale who has a hidden agenda that will likely spell trouble for the PI. In the case of Harry Turtledove’s latest novel, Twice as Dead, the woman in question is much more fatale than in a normal story: she is a vampire.

The private investigator is Jack Mitchell, a chain smoking, hard drinking private detective in a post-WWII Los Angeles that is very different from the historical one. Vampires live openly in the city in their own Vampire Town, coming out only at night. Ghosts exist, and some even work for the police department. Zombies are big business, being rented out as tireless laborers for menial tasks. And magic is real, and spellcasters can summon demons — or worse — into our reality.

The vampire is Dora Urban, and she hires Mitchell to find her half brother Rudolf Sebestyn, who has gone missing without warning. Against his own misgivings, and the warnings of the talking cat Old Man Mose who deigns to live with him, Jack takes the case, and finds himself increasingly smitten with the beautiful, mysterious and powerful Dora. He has plenty of bills to pay and is way behind on paying them, so he ends up taking two other cases at the same time: an investigation into a man’s cheating wife and another missing persons case where a factory worker didn’t return home from work one night. As Jack digs deeper into each of these cases, he finds that there is more going on than he imagined, and strange connections arise between his investigations. Complicating things, crooked members of the LAPD show a keen interest in Mitchell’s activities, and aren’t above sending rodent spies to keep track of him. By the end of the story, all of the cases will cross paths, and Los Angeles might be forever changed by their revelations.

This is only the second novel I’ve read by Harry Turtledove, after his fantastic alien contact novel Three Miles Down. I became curious to read more of his work through interactions with him on social media, and have been a fan ever since. When I saw his newest was coming out, I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.

I must admit that I found the beginning of the book a little slow going and I had a hard time settling into it. This is perhaps not surprising, because Turtledove had to introduce the background for an alternate universe and history where supernatural beings walk among us in an uneasy peace. Furthermore, as the cover indicates, this is only Book One of what will presumably be a series set in the “City of Shadows,” so setting up the ground rules early on is important. Once I got a few chapters in, however, I really became enamored with the characters, the city, and the predicaments that arise. Though first in a series, the book leads to a very satisfying, self-contained solution — though the ramifications of this book clearly will lead to many more problems and conflicts later in the series.

Twice as Dead is detective story, so you might wonder how well the detective aspects of the story work. I found the resolution of the various cases to be quite satisfying, and there were plenty of twists and surprises that I didn’t see coming along the way.

From what I’ve seen of Turtledove’s writing, and his opinions on social media, his books are always about something more than just a fun story. In this case, Twice as Dead explores troubled race relations and the challenges of being a member of a minority group in a country where bigotry is rampant. The vampires of the story, despite what one might expect, play the role of an oppressed minority. Though they are very powerful, they also are limited in number and have well-known weaknesses that leaves them vulnerable to the larger human population. Mitchell himself is well familiar with these problems, as a man of mixed race origins who can usually pass for white when he needs to. All of the cases that Mitchell takes on end up, one way or another, connecting back to the idea that minority groups are taken advantage of and taken for granted by the majority.

The book also has an unflinching view of the corruption of law enforcement. The police in the novel are largely corrupt and pursuing their own agendas that are quite independent of serving the public. All of the social commentary in the book is very timely, considering current events in the world.

Did I mention how fun Old Man Mose is? Turtledove captures what sort of an attitude a cat would have if it could talk. To me, Mose acts a bit as an audience surrogate, pointing out constantly those things that Jack is doing that are almost certainly a bad idea.

Overall, I found Twice as Dead to be a fun and compelling novel of an alternate magical Los Angeles, and I’m curious to see where Turtledove takes Jack Mitchell — and Mose — next!

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